Earlier entries of this series can be found here: http://www.acclaimedmusic.net/forums/vi ... ive#p45337
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“Spend my nights and days before/ Searching the world for what’s right here”
100. The xx - Islands
The facts:
Year: 2009.
Genre: Indie pop.
Country: United Kingdom.
Album: xx.
Acclaimed Music ranking: #2152.
Song ranking on Acclaimed Music in the artist’s discography: 4th.
Ranks higher than Zebra by Beach House, but lower than Mal Hombre by Lydia Mendoza.
Place in the Acclaimed Music Song Poll 2015: Unranked.
The people:
Produced by Jamie Smith.
Lyrics by Romy Madley Croft & Oliver Sim.
Vocals by Romy Madley Croft & Oliver Sim.
Guitar by Romy Madley Croft & Baria Qureshi.
Bass by Oliver Sim.
Beats by Jamie Smith.
MPC by Jamie Smith.
Keys by Baria Qureshi.
The opinion:
Woohoo, the 100th entry in this series! A conventional way of celebrating something like this would be a special about a song close to my heart. Sadly, actually selecting a song goes against the idea of this whole series, so I’m going to be writing about something… random. Luckily, it happens to be a good song from an album that happens to be a personal favourite.
To start, I should say that talking about songs from the album xx is almost a contradictory act to me. The album has three tracks ranked on the Acclaimed Music top 10.000, so people do consider these songs as separate parts, but to me this has always been one of my go-to examples of an album that feels like one whole piece. Not in a way like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, of course, where the whole album plays as a continues song. It’s more that on xx the songs together create a sustained mood that is far more powerful than each track is on its own. I play xx when I am in a certain mood, or better said, when I want to sit in a specific atmosphere.
Judging comments on the internet and in reviews I notice I’m hardly the only one who thinks this is a night-time album. Words like “dark”, “nocturnal”, “calm” and “cool” come easily. It is rather funny how something so indirect and abstract as a sound can paint so clearly a picture. Nobody calls this a high noon, summertime, beach side, party album.
With all this in mind, the production history of the album is interesting. It is well documented in an extensive interview with Rodaidh McDonald by Matt Frost for Sound on Sound (see link below). McDonald is engineer and company executive of XL Recordings, where The xx recorded their debut and he functioned as a shadow producer there. It was his idea that the band actually produce their own album (which subsequently lead to the promotion of Jamie Smith as a producer), but he had a lot of influence on the studio set-up.
Rodiadh McDonald and studio boss Richard Russell received some sets of demo’s by The xx, including one with the telling label “What producers did wrong”, full of overproduced tracks. The oldest set of demo’s, equally helpfully labelled “Early demo’s”, in contrast were spare recordings. McDonald saw how such open sounded songs could tempt a producer to fill in the gaps and create a fuller sound, but McDonald himself was attracted to the spacious sound of the demo’s and felt that they should be replicated on the finished product.
Another factor of the early recordings that impressed the people at XL Recordings was the intimacy. Luckily, McDonald had just arranged a sort of tiny, cosy rehearsal space at the studio and thought that it might be suitable as a small recording studio. The xx were the first to record in the small space. To make things more intimate some instrumental parts were even recorded in the hallway. Nowadays, the small room as well as the hallway are actually remade to be little recording spots.
This was really how The xx wanted to record their music as it was what they were used to. They wrote and rehearsed most of their music at home. Famously, they played their instruments softly and sang in soft voices there as to not wake the neighbours. The low-key, intimate style of The xx found their start in environmental circumstances, a happy accident if you will. It is important to consider that they made songs in that way that don’t feel hampered by these limitations, but make them feel part of it. Their lyrics for example are very intimate and feel like listening in to lovers in bed discussing the pros and cons, ins and outs of their relationship. I always get a visual image in my head of a darkened, small high-rise room in a big city, only one night light still burning, with two people softly talking things over. Still Oliver Sim and Romy Madley Croft, who sang and wrote all the album’s lyrics together, were not lovers. In fact, they are both gay.
I guess it is required to talk about the actual song of the week now. As I already said, I hardly consider this a song album and everything I wrote about the album – including the feelings and images it evokes – goes equally for Islands. Luckily, it is perhaps the song here that works the best taken alone (more so than the more frequently singled-out Crystalised, if you ask me). It has the most clear theme in its lyrics and its build is more single-friendly. I mean this all relatively.
What about those lyrics? This is more relationship material. In a funny turn of events, this is the second song in a row with “Island” in the title I write about, after last week’s Island of Dreams by The Springfields. The two songs seem to have an unintended argument going on with each other, as the island serves a similar function. Whereas The Springfields longed to go to the titular island because a relationship doesn’t work out, The xx don’t feel the need to go to an island anymore, because a relationship is finally working. “I am yours now” sing the two singers, “So now I don’t ever have to explore”. Curiously, the song is mostly seen as a break-up song online. Either my interpretative skills of simple lyrics have left me, or other people are just get the meaning of the song out of the music video or the other themes on the album.
Islands is the most danceable track on the record, that is it’s most important feature that separates it (barely) from the rest of the songs here. When Islands comes up, I feel like doing a sort of rhythmic dance, whereas everything else on xx makes me want to sit down in my room, watching the night-time rain wash over my window. I’ve already noted where the sound of The xx came from, but it is also interesting to find out that besides more obvious influences like The Cure the band where very much inspired by dance music like New Order and even Eurythmics. On Islands I hear it, albeit in a small way. All songs by The xx are based on clear rhythms as Jamie Smith’s beat was always the starting point from were the rest of the song was developed. Still, Islands has a sense of motion lacking – if not necessarily missing - in most early xx songs. The only downside here is that Oliver Sim’s vocals sound a bit too flat for a song like this.
Islands might very well be the bands best song, even if that doesn’t mean much here. The sound turned out the be hard to continue on. Their next album was even more low-key, but it mostly seemed like inertia at that stage and I don’t really like Coexist (Angels is a great song, though). On I See You at the beginning of this year they made more of a real pop album. It still bears the identity of The xx and it is very solid (even if I admit it doesn’t really excite me), but I wonder if they ever will be able to make something as unique as xx again.
8/10
https://www.soundonsound.com/people/rod ... cording-xx
Other versions:
There are only a few covers. Unexpectedly, one is by Shakira, who keeps very faithful to the original and just upped the tempo some. She got a lot of good reviews for it, but I don’t see the value in it, I’m afraid. Give me the collaboration between Firefox AK and Tiger Lou. They change the instrumentation and loosen things up and make a more upbeat song out of it. I quite like it.
Another surprise is the obligatory strings-only cover by Midnite Strings Quartet. Done that way, the song becomes something else; something more melancholy and darker. It does something with me. Also, after weeks of absence, we finally have another baby version of a song. No, I don’t like it either, but apparently someone thinks that this is the stuff parents play for their new-borns.
There are also a bunch or remixes of the song. Why is it that every electronic track gets so many obligatory remixes? I know every now and then one becomes a hit, but mostly it seems a promotional exercise. I wouldn’t trade any of these remixes for the original and I only think that the vary spacious sounding version by Delorean creates something interesting and worthwhile.
The playlist:
As a bonus, you get the single b-side Do You Mind?